23 Responses to “Kindle Fire half of all Android tablets”

Pay closer attention — the Kindle Fire is made by Amazon, not Google. And the fact that Amazon’s tablet has half of Android tablet market share is probably a big reason why Google only has 33% market share.

Android is open, which means people can do whatever they want with it. Or at least device manufacturers can. The Kindle Fire doesn’t use the Android Market (or Google Play or whatever), but Amazon’s own app store.

So more than 50% of the tablet owners will not be buying their apps from Google. The Nook also has its own app store, so that’s probably the 13% that’s still missing from the statistics.

Seems to me that what the article that’s linked to means; is that only 33% of Android tablets are using the Google marketplace. The Google marketplace is where the majority of Google revenue on the Android come from. The article continues to speculate that a rumored Google tablet ‘the Nexus’ will be priced to undermine the Kindle.

In my opinion undermining the Kindle could be a bad idea since the Kindle itself is a loss leader that according to rumor is failing to make back its investment. However the Google marketplace with its large range of Apps may have a better chance at recouping losses compared to Amazons marketplace with its focus on entertainment products.

The thing about this article is that it only deals with absolute tablet sales. If you consider the popularity of custom ROMs, then you’ll come up with a number definitely skewed to Google Market since virtually all custom ROMs load GoogleApps, which includes Google Market.

In fact, you’ll then need to include tablets that weren’t sold with Android, such as the wonderful HP TouchPad. I’m running Cyanogenmod 9 (== Android 4) on TouchPad.

Nooks, Fires… Anyone loading a custom ROM on either and will then load Google Apps and access Google Market for apps. Amazon’s app store and the B&N app store are both losing customers to Google Market.

Exactly – not sure why anyone would want to run the gimped versions on the Fire or the Nook.
When I went in to test drive the latest tablets, those walled-in versions of Android just seemed stale and constricted.

Yup!. 7 in is my format of choice but I’ll never give into Amazon’s trap. I hope that the tablet Google will sell, in collaboration with Asus will all that was showed at CES 2012. I’d pay the 50$ premium for that.

Still haven’t worked out what a tablet is actually for – other than some media consumption (I grant you that it’s a better “handheld” console than anything Sony or Nintendo have managed, for certain definition of “handheld”.) In order to actually do anything on it, you need to add all the peripherals that basically turn it into a laptop anyway.
And while the Kindle may indeed turn out to only be a flash-in-the-pan, I would be extremely depressed if backlit LCD screens were ultimately the only thing that were available. It’s like being forced to watch a movie in 3D…

I find a tablet to be quite handy as an adjunct to my monitor. I use the tablet to display documentation for various packages that run in full screen mode. It has cut down on the stacks of manuals on my desk as well as what I would otherwise have been carrying on my commute.

Think of it as a digital extension of yourself. Much like a smartphone, I find tablets are less for doing ‘standalone’ tasks (that you would do to the exclusion of other activities), and more for enhancing what you are presently doing (and would be doing without a tablet). Less ‘a type of PC’ and more an extra part of your brain that has good memory, universal access to information, good math skills, and the ability to communicate at a distance.

I’ve had my tablet for over a year now, and only this morning was I allowed the update that I would say makes it feel something resembling “finished”. (version 4.0 that Google released last fall)

I still don’t have root access, and my tablet still has stuff I don’t need on it, but it works fine for web, videos, PIM, and the like. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d rather have something like a laptop, if only because they have more/better places to grip them by.

I agree that tablets are primarily for consumption of media and purchasing products. That said, as a teacher and frequent lecturer, I find myself wanting some sort of tablet that can hold my notes and also control my presentation software. The Keynote app for iPod Touch does a decent job as a remote, but its screen is too small for notes. I currently use a laptop, but that tends to make me too static with my physical presence, which is a bad thing, especially in the classroom where vampiric baseball caps feed on the attention spans of the young.

Nevermind what people might think about it, does the Barnes & Noble Nook sell so poorly that it just gets lumped in with Other? I seriously doubt that. If comScore didn’t include those, then the numbers for non-android market tablets skews even lower for Google.

Am I just thicker than usual today, or does the last paragraph suffer an Electronista editing fail? “…comScore discovered that those with small tablets were much more likely to use the web. Where someone with a seven-inch tablet…or a five-inch crossover…typically looked at no more than 90 pages, those with a larger design like…the 9.7-inch iPad looked at 116 or more. The gap suggested that the willingness to see content, including beyond the web, was directly linked to screen size.”

From the quoted stats, sure seems that large tablets are pulling down more pages than their diminutive cousins.

The really odd part is how at the bottom it says that people who have smaller screen sizes use the web more, and then give data that is exactly the opposite of that, with page views increasing along side screen sizes.

I think a problem with all this is it muddy’s the whole “tablet” market. The KF is a media player and eReader, with limited access to apps. I’m in IT at my company and we support iPads, and were looking at supporting “Android Tablets”, but- it’s hard to define what constitutes an “Android Tablet”. Can the KF really be classed with something like an iPad or Xoom/Xyboard/Galaxy Tab? We have staff who think we should help them with their Nook Color or KF, just because as far as they are concerned- it is an “Android Tablet”…

For me- what constitutes and “Android Tablet” is one that can run a majority of the apps in the Google Play store, and isn’t tied by default to a subset of apps on a proprietary store- like Amazon and B&N. Things were really bad last winter, when there were dozens of cheap “Android Tablets” selling for <$200, most of which were barely functional.